On carbon, Brown battles his own party
When it comes to fighting climate change, Ontario Progressive Conservative l eader Patrick Brown is rather boxed in. His position has some merit: the Liberals’ cap- and- trade system is a complicated cash grab. A revenue- neutral carbon tax would be simpler, more effective and … well, not a cash grab. On the campaign trail, Brown could sell it as an income- tax cut first and foremost, as Michael Chong tried to do in pursuit of the federal Conservative leadership: let’s tax carbon, which is a bad thing, instead of income, which is a good thing. It’s the next best thing to taxing nothing at all!
The problem, of course, is that many in Brown’s and Chong’s parties subsist on the fantasy of taxing nothing at all — or nothing new, anyway. Wherever Chong went, Conservatives greeted his proposal to implement “one of the largest income tax cuts in Canadian history” with lusty booing. Brown’s self-revelation as a supporter of carbon pricing was reportedly greeted with anguished, disbelieving cries.
On t he hustings, t his might be less of a problem than it appears. A recent Université de Montréal study of Canadian popular opinion did not find massive disparities across the province. Overall, 63 per cent of Ontarians felt the earth was getting warmer “partly or mostly” because of human action, and 49 per cent said they supported “increasing taxes on carbon-based fuels” — an unusually accurate way to frame the carbon tax question. Ontario’s most skeptical riding, Stormont-DundasSouth Glengarry, still found 50 per cent and 39 per cent support for these propositions, respectively.
That’s still only 49- percent support overall for a carbon tax that actually costs people money, mind you, and many Tories utterly loathe the concept beyond all hope of convincing them otherwise. The idea of dismantling existing Liberal emissions- reductions plans is a huge applause line, as anyone at last month’s federal Conservative leadership convention could tell you; what comes next is an afterthought, if it’s anything.
That’s all good fun in opposition. There are plenty of Canadian Conservatives who would prefer to do absolutely nothing about greenhouse- gas emissions, and it’s a nice indulgence to pretend that’s a realistic option when you have no power anyway. Once conservative politicians are in government, however, evidence suggests they feel considerable pressure to at least pretend they care and have a plan. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, a staunch opponent of the federal Liberal approach, has a climate-change plan: it includes carbon capture and storage and more renewables, both of which are extremely expensive propositions. (He wants federal taxpayers’ help, you will be unsurprised to learn.) Heck, even the Trump administration recommitted to reducing emissions when it pulled out of the Paris climate accord.
The result of all this unseriousness is that when conservatives actually do want to get serious about emissions — and I’m assuming for the sake of argument here that Brown does — they are not taken seriously. It frustrates the Chongistas no end that the Conservative Party of Canada contains so few people who are both concerned about climate change and faithful in the power of markets: people who hate taxes on principle should understand their disruptive power more than anyone. And there is no question Canadians have placed far too much value on the Liberals’ climate-change commitments relative to their accomplishments.
But when t he Liberals ratified Kyoto and then didn’t do much of anything about it, they were being true to themselves. That’s what Liberals do. Conservative parties, far too often, have fallen short of their freely made commitments even more disreputably: opposing market- based solutions they ought to support, supporting command- andcontrol solutions they ought to abhor, constantly indulging their supporters’ antipathy to the whole idea.
Indeed, one could feel a bit bad for Patrick Brown, who says he wants to fight climate change in a conservative way, if this weren’t a relatively new position. “It would not be my plan to bring in a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax,” he told the Toronto Star during his leadership campaign. “I’m not ruling out cap-and-trade forever,” he added. Now he goes after cap- and- trade hammer and tongs, even as it’s producing good headlines for the Liberals: people are buying the emissions allowances, and for a pretty penny.
If Premier Brown didn’t want cap- and- trade to be a cash grab, he could just roll the windfalls into tax cuts. If Canadian conservatives were actually concerned about climate change, or concerned with credibly appearing to be concerned about climate change, that’s the basic idea they should have been supporting from the get- go. They didn’t, and they are being judged accordingly.